In the United States, people are deeply divided along lines of race, class, political party, gender, sexuality, and religion. Many believe that historical grievances must eventually be left behind in the interest of progress toward a more just and unified society. But too much in American history is unforgivable and cannot be forgotten. How then can we imagine a way to live together that does not expect people to let go of their entrenched resentments? Living with Hate in (...) American Politics and Religion offers an innovative argument for the power of playfulness in popular culture to make our capacity for coexistence imaginable. Jeffrey Israel explores how people from different backgrounds can pursue justice together, even as they play with their divisive grudges, prejudices, and desires in their cultural lives. Israel calls on us to distinguish between what belongs in a raucous “domain of play” and what belongs in the domain of the political. He builds on the thought of John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum to defend the liberal tradition against challenges posed by Frantz Fanon from the left and Leo Strauss from the right. In provocative readings of Lenny Bruce’s stand-up comedy, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, and Norman Lear’s All in the Family, Israel argues that postwar Jewish American popular culture offers potent and fruitful examples of playing with fraught emotions. Living with Hate in American Politics and Religion is a powerful vision of what it means to live with others without forgiving or forgetting. (shrink)

Historically, American political science has rarely engaged popular culture as a central topic of study, despite the domain’s outsized influence in American community life. This article argues that this marginalization is, in part, the by-product of long-standing disciplinary debates over the inadequate political development of the American public. To develop this argument, the article first surveys the work of early political scientists, such as John Burgess and Woodrow Wilson, to show that their reformist (...) ambitions largely precluded discussion of mundane activities of social life such as popular culture. It then turns to Harold Lasswell, who produced some of the first investigations of popular culture in American political science. Ironically, however, his work – and the work of those who adapted similar ways of speaking about popular culture after him – only reinforced skepticisms concerning the American public. It has thus helped keep the topic on the margins of disciplinary discourse. (shrink)

Political Philosophy Comes to Rick's focuses on reading one of the world's most watched films, Casablanca, politically. Contributors contend that the popularity of the film lies in its ability to present American civic culture, the American character, if you will, in a thoughtful, dramatic, and enduring way.

Despite its origins in explorations of the political and institutional history that had become unfashionable in History departments, the Political Science subfield of American Political Development has drifted toward the “history‐from‐below” view against which it was originally a reaction. Perhaps this is a normal tendency in democratic cultures that ground their legitimacy on the will of the people. But it may also be due to a failure of APD scholars to appreciate that even in a democratic (...) country such as the United States, the state may acquire autonomy from the public will because of the vast scope of state activity, and the restricted ability of the people to monitor, understand, and control that activity. Philip E. Converse's signal contribution to the public‐opinion literature can thus be the starting point for a revision of American political history with an eye to the autonomy that political elites may gain from public ignorance of their actions. (shrink)

Inheriting the religious prejudices of the Enlightenment, many supporters of liberal democracy consider John Calvin's theology contrary to the norms and virtues necessary for productive public discourse in a religiously and culturally diverse society. In Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics , Michael Walzer makes a similar assumption, arguing that, despite its contribution to political modernization, the inherent fideism, absolutism, and intolerance of Calvinism constitutes a threat to public discourse in liberal society. In (...) this paper, I contend that the prevailing understanding of Calvin's theology is incorrect. In actuality he is a nuanced natural law thinker, whose complex understanding of human nature and the state encourages the subtle balance of virtues that contemporary political life requires. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:White Power and American Neoliberal Culture by Patricia Ventura and Edward K. ChanJennifer A. Wagner-LawlorPatricia Ventura and Edward K. Chan. White Power and American Neoliberal Culture. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023. 168 pp., hardcover, $22.95. ISBN 9780520392793.White Power and American Neoliberal Culture, by utopian studies scholars Patricia Ventura and Edward K. Chan, feels like a tour de force. I say "feels" (...) for a reason: if you live in America, what you read in this book feels entirely familiar, sketching out U.S. racialized socio-political dynamics. But I also experienced a feeling of uncanniness, as Ventura and Chan expose the underbelly of a white supremacist United States—in which I happen to live. I have not read so clear and so well historicized an account of the kinds of events that prompt me to say, almost nightly, "This country is insane." The book does not change that opinion—but it does do something else: it makes sense of the insanity. It is a diagnosis of the social and ethical dis-ease, the etiology of which the authors locate in the country's very earliest days (indeed before). I do not usually point at book jacket blurbs in reviews, but I found the comments on this text's back cover absolutely accurate, with words like "urgent," "striking," "gripping," "timely," and "chilling" precisely describing my own experience of reading White Power and American Neoliberal Culture. Part of that affective impact, for a well-educated white citizen of this country, comes from the book's frank assessments not only of white supremacists' ongoing threat to democracy but also of the complicity of the "intellectual class" in this country, which often finds itself frankly baffled by such phenomena as a twice-impeached, four-times-(so-far)-indicted, overtly racist and sexist ex-president to be the unchallenged frontrunner for the Republican Party's nomination for the 2024 presidential election. The authors of White Power do not hesitate to describe events such as the Charlottesville white supremacy march and the January 6 insurrection as anything but a "horror"; that said, the point of their analysis is not to demonize "Trump voters" as "far white" supremacists and "cultists" [End Page 251] (CNN's most frequent nomination recently) but to distinguish carefully the factors at play that pull together "normal Republicans" and fringe racist and nationalist groups under one banner. The "red thread" from the founding of the colonies to this moment is always, and still, they argue, race. It is actually "chilling" to read Ventura's and Chan's explanation of how the white nationalist movement, which seems (and is) so radically anti-democratic, makes a certain kind of sense, and why a populist attraction to authoritarianism will continue to threaten what "we" (the identity of which is, of course, the central question) have (mis)understood "democracy in America" to be.Many readers will know that Ventura and Chan have collaborated for some years—and to see a co-authored book emerge from that work is a testament to how that collaboration has thrived, by "building on our previous separate scholarship that analyzes white power utopias (Chan) and American neoliberal culture (Ventura)" (4). In the overlap of their work, they have illuminated a troubling gap in the literature of neoliberalism and utopia alike: race. The intersection of critical race studies and utopian studies was only starting to appear in the 1990s and early 2000s; the collaboration of Ventura and Chan in mining the historical and narratological resources of thinking utopia through race, and race through utopia, has proven itself more than the sum of its parts, as they say: their work has been generative in several fields.Moreover, their mutual accountability as authors has a direct impact on the quality of the book's prose. Both are admirably clear writers in their own right. In White Power, the rigor of this collaborative process, which ultimately depends on trust and on an intellectual consensus about what they put down on paper, informs the confidence and concision of the prose; the careful historicizing of literary/aesthetic, political, and economic contexts heightens the urgency of the book's conclusions. There is... (shrink)

This volume reaches beyond the controversy surrounding the teaching and learning of evolution in the United States, specifically in regard to the culture, politics, and beliefs found in the Southeast. The editors argue that despite a deep history of conflict in the region surrounding evolution, there is a wealth of evolution research taking place—from biodiversity in species to cultural evolution and human development. In fact, scientists, educators, and researchers from around the United States have found their niche in the (...) South, where biodiversity is high, culture runs deep, and the pace is just a little bit slower. (shrink)

Recent critics have called attention to the alienation of contemporary academics from broad currents of intellectual activity in public culture. The general complaint is that intellectuals are finding a professional home in institutions of higher learning, insulated from the concerns and interests of a wider reading audience. The demands of professional expertise do not encourage academics to work as public intellectuals or to take up social, literary, or political matters in imaginative and perspicuous ways. More problematic is the (...) relative absence of religion in the writings of those who aspire to work as public intellectuals. This essay reviews recent attempts by William Dean, Cornel West, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Stephen Carter, and Robin Lovin to remedy the problem of academic alienation and to address the place of religion in American life. (shrink)

The English translation of Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere converges with a recent trend toward the revival of the "political culture concept" in the social sciences. Surprisingly, Habermas's account of the Western bourgeois public sphere has much in common with the original political culture concept associated with Parsonian modernization theory in the 1950s and 1960s. In both cases, the concept of political culture is used in a way that is neither (...) class='Hi'>political nor cultural. Explaining this peculiarity is the central problem addressed in this article and one to follow. I hypothesize that this is the case because the concept itself is embedded in an historically constituted political culture (here called a conceptual network)-a structured web of conceptual relationships that combine into Anglo-American citizenship theory. The method of an historical sociology of concept formation is introduced to analyze historically and empirically the internal constraints and dynamics of this conceptual network. The method draws from new work in cultural history and sociology, social studies, and network, narrative, and institutional analysis. This research yields three empirical findings: this conceptual network has a narrative structure, here called the Anglo-American citizenship story; this narrative is grafted onto an epistemology of social naturalism; and these elements combine in a metanarrative that continues to constrain empirical research in political sociology. (shrink)

The English translation of Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere converges with the revival of the "political culture concept" in the social sciences. Surprisingly, Habermas's account of the Western bourgeois public sphere has much in common with the original political culture concept associated with Parsonian modernization theory in the 1950s and 1960s. In both cases, the concept of political culture is used in a way that is neither political nor cultural. Explaining (...) this peculiarity is the central problem addressed in this article and its companion piece, which appeared in Sociological Theory, volume 3, number 2 (1995). I hypothesize that this is the case because the concept itself is embedded in an historically constituted political culture (here called a conceptual network)-a structured web of conceptual relationships that combine into Anglo-American citizenship theory. The method of an historical sociology of concept formation is used to analyze historically and empirically the internal constraints and dynamics of this conceptual network. The method draws from new work in cultural history and sociology, social studies, and network, narrative, and institutional analysis. This research yields three empirical findings: this conceptual network has a narrative structure, here called the Anglo-American citizenship story; this narrative is grafted onto an epistemology of social naturalism; and these elements combine in a metanarrative that continues to constrain empirical research in political sociology. (shrink)

Political cartoons make meaning by drawing on scenarios that must be immediately recognizable by their intended audience. Crucial meaning-making mechanisms in these scenarios are verbo-visual ensembles of metaphors and metonymies. In this paper we investigate 69 Chinese and 60 American political cartoons published in 2018 and 2019 that pertain to the two nations’ trade conflict. By examining the cross-cultural similarities and differences between metaphors and metonymies, we chart how Chinese and American cartoonists portray this trade conflict. (...) We end by showing how a complete interpretation of the cartoons requires enrichment with insights provided by yet other analytical instruments. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to test whether personal commitment to community was related to political involvement in two cultural contexts: Italy and the USA. Participants were 566 adolescents (48.2% males) aged 14–19 years (M = 16 years; SD = 1.29): 311 Italians and 255 Americans. Participants filled out a self-report questionnaire. Analyses of variance revealed that American high school students reported higher levels of personal commitment to community than did their Italian peers and that many forms (...) of political involvement were significantly more common among American adolescents. Structural equation modeling analyses revealed that personal commitment to community was strongly and positively associated with involvement in political activities in both adolescent samples. Thus, fostering personal commitments to community could potentially lead youth to political engagement. (shrink)

Michael Sandel sees Rawls' liberal theory of justice as abstractly uncomprehensive of another, republican view of the essential relation of political life to moral culture. But, as reference to the debates of the Civil War and the New Deal show, his own jeremiadic account of American history equally misrepresents the dialectical interplay of liberal and republican moments that is essential in American freedom.

Arnold Schwarzenegger's celebrity status allowed him to project a symbolic masculine persona that was effective in gaining political power as California governor. The well-known violent tough-guy persona that Schwarzenegger developed in the mid-1980s contributed to a post—Vietnam era cultural remasculinization of the American man. But this narrow hyper-masculinity was often caricatured in popular culture and delegitimized. In the 1990s and 2000s, Schwarzenegger forged a credible masculine imagery by introducing characters who were humorously self-mocking and focused on care (...) and protection of children. Schwarzenegger's resultant hybrid masculinity, the “Kindergarten Commando,” represents an ascendant hegemonic masculinity always foregrounding muscle, toughness, and the threat of violence and following with situationally appropriate symbolic displays of compassion. The equation of toughness plus compassion composing the Kindergarten Commando is asymmetrical, with toughness eclipsing compassion; this has implications for the kinds of policies that U.S. elected leaders advocate. Republicans utilize this masculine imagery in national politics to gain voters' trust in times of fear and insecurity and continue to employ a strategy that projects a devalued feminized stigma onto more liberal candidates. (shrink)

We would like to open some questions here about the institutional and cultural conditions of anything that might be called cultural studies or multiculturalism. By introducing cultural studies and multiculturalism many intellectuals aim at a more democratic culture. We share this aim. In this essay, however, we would like to argue that the projects of cultural studies and multiculturalism require: a more international model of cultural studies than the dominant Anglo-American versions; renewed attention to the institutional environments of (...) cultural studies; and a questioning of the relations between multiculturalism and identity politics. We seek less to “fix” these problems than to provide a critical analysis of the languages, the methods of criticism, and the assumptions about identity, culture, and politics that present the problems to us. Because the thickets entangling what our group calls cultural studies are so deeply rooted in Western academia, which to a large degree constitutes our own group, the counterexample of cultural criticism in other contexts can be more than usually instructive. We begin by considering the position of cultural studies in China, since our group includes a number of Chinese intellectuals, on whose experience the following section is largely based. The Chicago Cultural Studies Group began meeting in June 1990. It includes Lauren Berlant, David Bunn, Vinay Dharwadker, Norma Field, Dilip Gaonkar, Marilyn Ivy, Benjamin Lee, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Xinmin Liu, Mathew Roberts, Sharon Stephens, Katie Trumpener, Greg Urban, Michael Warner, Jianyang Zha, and Jueliang Zhou. (shrink)

In this book, which forms part of the Routledge Cultural Studies Series, Adriana Bolívar focuses on the Latin American political culture and introduces an innovative way of seeing and analyzing pol...

This article considers the methodological limits and possibilities of a cultural turn in comparative religious ethics by “translating” the Latin American Indigenous meanings of buen vivir (living well), a subsistent mode of interdependent flourishing resistant to Western models of extractive development amid the Anthropocene. It problematizes the methodological challenge of translating Indigenous cultures from within a Western colonial political economy that has historically relegated Indigenous Americans to the primitive level of savage inferiority according to a stadial theory of (...) socioeconomic development. However, constructive methodological options for translating Indigenous cultures emerge from the Journal of Religious Ethics's existing conversations about comparative religious ethics. On the one hand, recent critical anthropology and ethnography, abetted by intellectual history, provide tools for ethicists in the recovery of Indigenous critiques and meanings against longstanding Western cultural patterns. On the other hand, nativizing the concept of the religious classic thematizes the normative dimensions of Indigenous cultures, demonstrating how the translation of buen vivir points to intercultural dialogue rather than cooptation and manipulation. (shrink)

Throughout the evolution of public political discourse we have repeatedly seen the effects of scandals on the careers of many politicians. Although the cultural and societal norms that have traditionally dictated the results of such scandals have changed dramatically within the last two centuries, I believe that the aftermath of these scandals may be better understood by analyzing and comparing the politician’s previously established public image to the scandal at hand. I will argue that a negative impact only occurs (...) if and when there is a clear contradiction of character that presents the politician as a deceitful or hypocritical person in the media sphere and therefore the eyes of the public. (shrink)

The Islamic historical narrative indicates a sharp break between the “age of ignorance” and the age of Islam that extends beyond religion and ethics to politics and culture. This article contributes to the scholarly effort to refute that break by examining an aspect of continuity in political thought, the Circle of Justice, a shorthand description of the organization of the state in the Middle East since ancient times. The stereotype sees the Circle as a Persian product; this article (...) shows that the Circle of Justice emerged millennia before the Persians, that the Persians were actually slow to make it their own, that aspects of it were part of Arabic culture before Islam, and that many people other than Persian scribes quoted or used it in the early Islamic centuries. Examining ancient cuneiform royal inscriptions, Pahlavi documents, the poetry addressed to Umayyad and ʿAbbāsid rulers, and early works of history and political thought, the article traces the Circle’s ideas down through the centuries until their encapsulation in the form we know today, the earliest version of which is found in the work of the historian and adab writer Ibn Qutayba. (shrink)

Explores the interplay between artistic values and social, political, and moral concerns in writings by African American and Native American women.